Ouroboros Spine even atlas cannot stand forever

The other talks with a boldness she would sooner scoff at than praise, for it mimics the attitude of her disgraced daughter who held herself too high, too soon. She sees a similar path in him, one due to come to an abrupt end when the boy would least expect it, for over the years as she has witnessed those similar to him in mannerisms grow, their fates had never been changed. But that is not her problem, and putting him in his place with a warning to tread lightly is not her authority, nor her responsibility. Instead, she brushes off what bloody inclinations scratch at her conscious and returns to his self-knowledgeable statement with a contradictory quirk of a brow, her voice condescendingly grave. "When you have as many wolves who would love to see you dead as I, you may find that hostility is a necessary evil." The wraith looks away at that, glancing about the clearing subtly, though she knows the likelihood of one of those enemies detecting her this easily is quite low. Perhaps there was an upside to being forgotten; her reputation faded away with it, or so, she would rather believe.

The woman does not take offense to his refusal of her offer. There are much more like him among their ranks, perhaps not as promising in youth as she acknowledges within him, but their ranks are equipped with enough tundrian warriors to outlast their rivals for years to come. It is his refusal to answer her inquiry to where he rests his head at night that causes her demeanor to change, endarken, if only slightly. Snarling internally, the baroness teeters the line of patience; he will make her work for it. She wonders if it is foolish to reveal her origins, and perhaps, it is. But the dark woods are no longer her's. They, in their blindsided quest to remove her from the forest, had lost all credibility to their name. They did not represent the darkness that once existed within the woods, the fear that resonated within the bones of all who passed by. They were simply a bunch of pissed of children of the night who liked to pretend they were much, much worse than in actuality, they were. Nemesis had been their last hope, in truth, to carry them on to much higher purpose than the all-defeating one they served. They had lost all that upon her exile, and she harbored no mercy for what would become of them. "I am. Now, I hail from the far north, but before that, a dark wood you should wish you never have the unpleasantries of encountering," In some respect, it irks her that she must play docile -- flirt even, to get at what she needs to know, much like she had in her days of youth. It puts skills to use that she had forgotten she had, for she could not simply demand her way through the Teekon while her cavalry lied moons away.

In this, she knows she reveals too much, putting herself on the line as she speaks more and more of who she is and an insight of who she used to be. Yet, she harbors no regret for who that woman was. The dark woods had made her strong, culled her soul over and over enough times to produce a being so utterly chained to the concept of war that whatever came her way was simply target practice for the next, bigger and badder enemy that attempted to oppose Mephala's sect. How foolish it had been to assume that it would never change, that the exact same dark woods would turn on her one day and eject her from the home she had upkept long before many of its current inhabitants lived there. But in her favor did the outcome surface. She knows the woods inside and out, like a scar on the back of her paw, its secrets and its most abhorrent lies. Yet, what to do with that information was another topic of curious interest, what truths she could sell to its enemies to ensure the brotherhood's extinction: with a price, of course.